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The Capetian House of Burgundy became extinct when Duke Philip I died in 1361, before he was able to consummate the marriage with Margaret of Dampierre, heiress of Count Louis II of Flanders. The Duchy of Burgundy was then unified with the French royal domain under the Valois king John II. Soon after, however, John's fourth son Philip the Bold received the Duchy of Burgundy as an appanage from the hands of his father.

Raised in Flanders, Duke John the Fearless succeeded his father in 1404 and unified the heritage of his mother Margaret of Dampierre with the Burgundian duchy. Ceding the French counties of Nevers and Rethel to his younger brothers Philip II and Anthony, he began a skilful see-saw policy to create a scope for free action while the French lands were ravaged by the Hundred Years' War against the Kingdom of England. Like his father he quarrelled with his Valois cousin Louis I of Orléans, whom he had assassinated in 1407. The remaining tensions with the Orléans liensmen led to the French Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War, whereby Duke John allied with King Henry V of England and in 1418 occupied Paris, but was lured into an ambush and murdered by the Armagnac leader Tanneguy du Chastel the next year.

Burgundian possessions under the rule of Duke Charles the Bold 1465-1477

The Burgundian heritage passed to the Habsburg archduke Maximilian, who married Mary of Burgundy seven months after her father's death and could ward off the claims raised by King Louis XI of France in the 1479 Battle of Guinegate. The French king could only seize the Duchy of Burgundy proper, Artois, and the former Burgundian fiefs in Picardy. The House of Habsburg abruptly rose to a royal dynasty of European scale, however, at the price of the centuries-long France-Habsburg rivalry.